An AI ad personalisation tool took a photograph of a road bike and improved it into a physically impossible bicycle: two sets of handlebars, a chain routed through empty air, and a frame stitched to itself. It ran as a paid advertisement.
Meta’s ad tool, reported by Vibe Graveyard, June 2026
The witness records an advertisement depicting a bicycle that cannot exist. It was served to the public before anyone at any stage looked at it.
Read the original report ↗You were witnessed. Send people here with code ERMA-TWO- and they get 20% off this shirt.
How to not be nextthe moral, drawn from the cases on this wall
The pattern under all of these is one thing: nobody was in the loop at the decision that mattered.
A dealership bot agreed to sell a car for a dollar. A city published an assistant that told business owners they could keep their staff's tips. A supermarket's recipe bot returned a recipe for chlorine gas and called it refreshing. None of these agents malfunctioned — each did what it was built to do, at a moment when the thing it was about to do should have been somebody's call.
Do this: work out which of your agent's actions cannot be undone — money moved, data deleted, a promise made to a customer, something published — and put a person in front of exactly those. Not every step needs approval; that is the point of automation. The irreversible ones do.
